1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to e-commerce customer-support services, and particularly, to enhanced features for a web-based billing system tool enabling customers to pay their invoices relating to telecommunications products and services on-line.
2. Discussion of the Background
Currently, there is no telecommunications enterprise or vendor providing telecommunications services that provide a fully integrated communications offering on the Internet with comprehensive product and services information, including electronic billing analysis and interactive customer support. In the area of billing for telecommunications products and services, telecommunications service enterprises provide capabilities for “on-line” electronic funds transfer (EFT) or public switched telephone network (PSTN) dial-up credit card payment of their invoices.
Existing comprehensive world-wide-web/Internet-based invoicing and payment systems (hereinafter “e-Billing”) enables customers to easily receive and analyze their invoices, and, in addition, enable customers to pay their invoices, electronically via electronic funds transfer. This “e-Billing” system includes a comprehensive software and system infrastructure that provides a variety of tools for enabling customers of telecom companies to receive, analyze and pay their invoices by a variety of methods, via a single comprehensive interface.
In open item accounts receivable systems, on-line invoices are posted and customer payments are received and applied to the outstanding invoice. Currently, if a customer shows a credit or zero balance, and that customer submits a further EFT payment, an accounting problem is created in that there is no outstanding invoice to apply the received payment to. This additional payment typically requires a special accounting procedure, often triggering some sort of manual intervention in the A/R department.
It would be highly desirable to eliminate the downstream accounting problems resulting from an overpayment by employing a Disallow Payment mechanism which prevents the acceptance of customer EFT payments from those customers having a credit or zero balance.